A son's long journey to love his father

Jun. 15, 2014
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Nick Roth, the son of Ed Roth, pores over his fatherā??s collection of papers and clippings. Ed Roth had stashed away
classical and jazz albums and nature photos heā??d taken while serving in the military. / Doug McSchooler, The Indianapolis Star

by Robert King, The Indianapolis Star

by Robert King, The Indianapolis Star

To him, Ed Roth was just mean - always angry, always irritable and prone to emotional outbursts. He wouldn't just scream at his young son, he would string together expletives in combinations the boy would remember the rest of his life.

Nick remembers his dad ruining family vacations - as close to good times as Nick can recall - by sitting on the hotel bed each night and counting their dwindling cash, threatening to take the family home the next day because they'd spent too much. He remembers his father uttering racial and ethnic slurs. He remembers Ed fighting so much with Nick's mother, Rosie, that when she talked of divorce, Nick urged her to do it. He was only in high school, but he was fine with never seeing his father again.

For the first three decades of his life, this was how Nick saw his father - the most bitter man he'd ever known. It was, however, not how he came to view him in the decade or so leading up to Ed's death last summer at age 84. By then, father and son had come to understand one another, and even respect one another.

Yet today, as Nick faces his first Father's Day without his dad, he's coming to terms with new information that offers some insight into the Ed Roth who made life so difficult for so long, something that strongly suggests his bouts of anger were beyond his control.

"Looking back," Nick said, "it explains so much."

Tough times ... and football

Nick knew the highlights of his father's life.

Ed Roth grew up in Fort Wayne during the Depression. His mother was chronically ill; his father mostly absent. At times he lived above a bakery, shoveling coal for a place to sleep. But he was big and fast and a naturally gifted athlete. He could throw the shot put out of sight. His real game, though, was football.

At Fort Wayne's South Side High School, Ed emerged as a star. He was recruited by the legendary coach Paul "Bear" Bryant, but couldn't bring himself to leave the state. So he chose Indiana University, where he played both offense and defense and his main goal in life, he told family later, was "to prove himself by knocking people on their asses."

Ed was good enough at it that, after college and a short stint in the Air Force, he spent a year playing professionally - in Canada, where the pay was better than the NFL. But it was a rough game. And for a mere $7,000 a year, he couldn't justify the abuse. He returned to Fort Wayne. At 31, he married and started a family.

A portrait of that still-young Ed Roth and his bride, Rosie, who was 10 years younger, now hangs prominently in Nick Roth's home. They look vibrant, healthy and happy. This is not how Nick knew them growing up. This is how he wants to remember them, how he thinks they might have been.

An unlikely breakthrough

The major turning point between Ed and Nick came at the unlikeliest of moments, when Nick finally broached the subject he'd been keeping from his dad and just about everyone else since he was a kid - that he was gay.

Nick was 31. Four years earlier he had told his mother, whom he'd practically worshipped since childhood and sided with during the family storms, and she didn't take it well. She'd urged him to withhold the secret from Ed. Now, Ed was asking Nick why, after his girlfriend long ago in high school, he had never found anyone else. Nick knew that, despite his dad's current girth and penchant for wearing bib overalls, he had once been quite a ladies' man.

How could he make him understand?

At first, he didn't. Then Nick broke it down in the rawest terms that an old dumb jock, as Ed referred to himself, could relate to: Asking him to remember the physical reaction he got from seeing the ample bosoms of actress Jayne Mansfield?

Together, they cried - a father and son who had never gotten along, who'd never had much good to say to one another, wept together. Ed told his son he wanted Nick to be happy, to find someone he could have a relationship with so he wouldn't get AIDS and die.

Ed said he thought he might even be at fault for Nick's homosexuality. It wasn't what his son wanted to hear, not after such a breakthrough. "I'm thinking, 'Oh surely you're not all involved with all that psychological mumbo jumbo about absent fathers.'"

But that wasn't where Ed was going.

When he was in the military, Ed confessed, a French sailor had made a pass at him - reached out and grabbed his ass when he was taking a leak in the latrine. Ed exploded. He jumped on the sailor and beat him within an inch of his life. Other men had to pull him off or he would have killed him. Back then, he said, the military didn't punish such things. Instead, Ed had to sit in the hospital with the sailor for two weeks, watching him gasp for breath as he struggled for life. Ed always felt ashamed about that. It's why, he explained, even in his angriest moments he was never physically abusive.

"In a way Nicky," he told his son decades later, "I think God gave me a gay son so that I would have to learn how to love a gay person. God made you gay to teach me a lesson."

Man of complications and contrasts

From then on, everything changed. Nick and his father grew closer. When Nick adopted two children from Guatemala, Ed welcomed them with love. Ed had chided Nick for spending so much on his master's degree in business, but when Nick shared with his dad how well commercial real estate work pays, Ed was stunned. And he admitted he'd been wrong.

For the longest time, Ed had seemed like a bumpkin in bib overalls, but Nick was learning that his father was more complicated than that. Nick concluded that children shouldn't rush to judge their parents, and that they should at least wait until they become parents themselves.

After football, Ed had worked as a railroad conductor, a night watchman and a firefighter. He had never made more than $30,000 a year. But he had begun tracking hundreds of companies in the stock market. He learned the market's tendencies. He earned enough to quit working. And by the time of the 2008 market crash, when he suffered big setbacks, Ed had amassed a portfolio worth $4 million.

Ed was a hoarder, too. Among the piles of stuff he kept in a barn, the family found a stash of classical and jazz albums. Nick's sister Mary found prints and slides of photographs he'd taken in the military. The photos were of mountains and streams and landscapes - subjects Mary also would be drawn to as a professional photographer. In the images, she saw some talent.

But there were other things the family noticed about Ed.

He had been forgetful, always. Never in his life could he remember names. He had lived most of his life in Fort Wayne, but if he deviated from his normal routes on a drive through town he'd be hopelessly lost. He paid magazine renewal notices over and over again until he was paid up seven years out. Over time, even the checkbook, which he had tended zealously, became chaotic.

Initially, Ed was diagnosed as an early-stage Alzheimer's patient.

But a few months before his death, Mary read an article in The New York Times about growing evidence that head trauma was linked to a long-term degenerative brain disease called chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE. The finding was based on posthumous studies of the brains of people who had been subjected to routine hits to the head, such as people who played hockey. And football.

When Mary read symptoms of the disease - short-term memory loss, impulsiveness, explosive behavior and other things - it was like a window into her past. "This was my childhood," she recalls thinking. "I was convinced that he had it."

Mary had seen the same explosions from her Dad growing up, but they were mostly directed at others. The father she saw was an odd mixture of the explosive, expletive-filled tirades in public and the man who could be gregarious, and who wouldn't let the women in the house carry out the garbage.

Nick and Mary did more research and found the Sports Legacy Institute, an organization near Boston devoted to the awareness and study of brain trauma. The institute even collects brains for study. When Ed died in August after a short illness, they arranged for his brain to be added to the study, which now includes 208 brains, many of former professional athletes.

A team of doctors and scientists conducted examinations and issued their findings last month. Their conclusions: No sign of Alzheimer's - but the frontal lobes of Ed Roth's brain, the part that takes a pounding when you're a football linemen, showed clear evidence of CTE.

A sense of relief, a measure of sadness

Most diagnoses of brain disease inspire fear, anxiety and alarm; this one brought relief. It had come after the patient's death, of course, which is now the only way CTE can be detected - through a postmortem exam. But to Nick and his sister, there was a new sense that so much of the difficulty early in their lives now had an explanation.

With that relief, there was also a measure of sadness. They realized that their father's impulsiveness, his explosiveness, his anger might have been avoidable - without the football. They wonder now if Rosie, who had been so hard on Ed through the years, might have acted differently if she had known he wasn't just being difficult, if there was a reason behind his ways.

Nick wonders if a little more compassion might sooner have brought out Ed's softer side. "I just wonder what it would have done for them," Nick said, "and for her especially."

Ed had played football at a rugged time in the game's history, when players routinely blocked and tackled by leading with their heads. He had played both offense and defense - something almost never done today - and thus doubled his exposure.

Although IU couldn't confirm this, Nick found clippings in his dad's scrapbook that said Ed Roth had led the Hoosiers in most minutes on the field for a single season. He had gone to IU to knock people on their asses. And he was given plenty of chances to do so. Over time, though, it cost him. As an old man, he would tell his daughter: Never let your son play football. He told lots of people that.

All that's left of Ed's football glories is his scrapbook, full of yellowed newspaper clippings, and stacks of black-and-white photos, including one of a growling, snarling young lineman who looks as if he's just waiting to tear the head off a quarterback. Nick is the keeper of this collection, which he's only begun to explore. He was never much of an athlete himself, but he leafs through his father's things it as if they were the Dead Sea Scrolls.

He's learned a few things about his dad's heroics, but nothing so profound as what he learned when he got to know his father better in those final years.

"He ended up being the example of unconditional love in my life," he said. "And I never, ever, ever thought growing up that he would be that man."